To all new founders and marketers with low budget, here’s how 17 different startups hustled for their first clients. If you’re feeling disheartened, I hope their narratives will inspire you to keep on running!

In this post, I feature some of their tales. You’ll find in them a generous mix of grunt work, guts, and genius.

1& 2: Tinder and Alibaba- physically traveled to their first users

Tinder ran from 5,000 to 15,000 users by get sorority girls to signup on the spot

Crucial to Tinder’s success was then-CMO Whitney Wolfe’s ideas for constructing an early user-base. She schemed a tour that would take her to prominent college campuses around the country.

She would go to chapters of her sorority, do her presentation, and have all the girls at the meetings install the app. Then she’d go to the coinciding brother fraternity–they’d open the app and find all these cute girls they knew. Tinder had fewer than 5,000 users before Wolfe stimulated her journey. When she returned, there were some 15,000.”